AJOHNNY

Yes, I’m still alive. I had to come back to share some thoughts for Blackout’s 10th anniversary because nothing is more Tumblr than sharing tons of thoughts about Blackout on its 10th anniversary:

You have to understand. There aren't many things I've held onto, pondered, or cherished for ten full years. My Facebook account is one of them. The others are Britney Spears' album Blackout, and the essay "Britney in the Dark Lodge" by @tomewing. For a decade I have remembered them constantly, or maybe it's better to say they haven't let me go. They've stayed tangled in me; they've yielded to however my life has bent, folded, and stretched since then. And thank god—what's better suited to the pleasures of overreading?

Tom's essay wonders at Blackout's main problem. How do you praise an album made by, or on behalf of, an almost-debilitated pop star. To this day, Britney is under a conservatorship. How much more so in 2007 (or less so, which is maybe the problem), when I, having listened to nothing but Christian and classical music for a whole childhood, watched that year's VMAs in my high school dorm room only to find that mainstream pop music was actually as alien as I'd thought? Here was a woman at the degree-zero of performance presence. I couldn't look away. I was fascinated.

That's not even mentioning the suffocating sense that something needed to change. That's not even noting feeling trapped in ballet, classical music, church—all the things that were supposed to be who I was (that is, all the things that were failing me, were not made for me). That's not even mentioning my then-nascent gayness. From beginning to end, Blackout is one long lesson in mediation. What you see, what's supposed to be the case, cannot in fact be trusted; fakery is the truest thing of all. The music thrills because it keeps erupting past its own surface. Like Tom Ewing says, autotune and other effects make this an album that can't ever be reproduced live. It exists most fully as a manufactured thing. Think of all the songs we have now with choruses that can only be sung by samplers and software. I think Blackout was the first time I realized I was haunted by the meaning of medium: what the form and surface of a thing seem to say, what they conceal, and how much an artist allows themselves to revel in artificiality, or not. (This lure is, by the way, how I eventually realized my enjoyment of Bruno Mars' music in particular is incredibly fraught. Why is he protecting himself.)

Eventually there was the question of, Why white girls, and What do they mean to me (thanks Hilton Als). Which was not separate from, What does it even mean for me to be a (black gay) man who enjoys and sometimes even mocks, for fun, the efforts of a subjugated woman as such. Which is not separate from, How could I have been so drawn to Justin Timberlake and his music, if he committed the first of many public violences waged against Britney. But then there was a friend on a long car trip: something like, "Sorry, could we not listen to his music?" (I'd taken control of the aux cord.) "I can't stand what he did to Janet." Because of course, his slandering of Britney holds no candle to his eventual denigration of Janet Jackson, rendering (white) woman as refuse and black woman as even less than. (The country doesn't deserve any other Super Bowl halftime act.) All this, as Britney's whole schtick—feeling overprotected, using synths and sex as pop-starlet strength and accession to adulthood, making her voice heard (literally, by puncturing the surface of the album to speak to listeners as a person, and not a studio product)—issues straight from Janet's mouth. All this, as JT continues to seize and starch the legacy of one of the world's queerblackest artists: a man who also figures as achingly, distractingly bright surface. Because you can't talk about Britney without talking about Justin, and you can't talk about either without talking about Janet and Michael. Because if Tom Ewing is to be believed—if Blackout is, at its core, a "black hole" (so common a phrase, but so appropriate!), a wound—then the Jacksons are its depth.